A PERSONAL ANNOUNCEMENT

Following a five year dream-guided journey, I have now completed my male-to-female transition with a successful Sex Reassignment Surgery on July 4^th of this year.  My wife, Martha, family, friends, colleagues and therapist have supported me throughout this journey, a generous support that has made my transition possible. It is now time for me to own this new expression in my professional life and work.  I will continue as before: seeing clients in my office and online, facilitating Family Constellations and Relational Boundaries workshops, and teaching the skills and ways of being that are needed to facilitate this mysterious system of healing; now with a new awareness and perception that comes with this change.  My transgender journey has deepened my attention to gender relations, gender identities and the fundamental role of patriarchy in our culture.  I am preparing a series of experiential, in-person workshops exploring the dynamics of patriarchy.

While I have a more female physiology, this is not a rejection of my male life.  The Indigenous world names people who express both genders as “Two-Spirited”, an expression coined in 1990 by Anishinaabe Elder Myra Laramee.  I think of myself as “ambigendered”, i.e. having access to both genders, a bridge between both expressions; like ambidextrous meaning left- and right-handed.

I have taken the name Emily in honour of my maternal grandmother whose husband, my grandfather, died of a heart attack in his early fifties.  I respond to both Emily and Jonathan, names which both touch my heart.